Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Obama and the Magic Gini

If you don't know what the Gini Coefficient is, that's alright. It just means you have a life. But for the sake of efficiency, the Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1. A country with a Gini coefficient of 0 means all income is distributed equally. And a country with a Gini coefficient of 1 means one person makes all the money. This measure was created to show just how skewed income distribution was and, truthfully, to make disparity income distributions "evil" or "bad" in the eyes of a naive public.

Sadly, despite Obama's ideologue-strength desire to redistribute income, he's only managed to (in the classic sense) make the rich get richer while the poor gets poorer. The Gini coefficient has been going up as it always has.

Technically that bold faced lie (the richer get richer and the poor gets poorer) is a lie. Both rich and poor are getting richer over time. It's just that the rich get richer faster because they have the majority of monies and can therefore capitalize on early investments in successful ventures. But still, as a relative measure, the poor continue to lose "relative" ground to the rich. And if you couldn't get an American-hating communist like Obama to lower the Gini coefficient, you're not going to find anyone to do it.